


Wind Chimes

by Ladybug_21



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Break Up, Canon Compliant, Earthquakes, F/M, Found Family, Gen, Momboss and Detectiveson, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:53:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26644798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: "You got off easy. You should have seen Air Temple Island after Tenzin broke up with me."Faced with the awkward prospect of a second (and possibly worse) break-up with Korra in the aftermath of Harmonic Convergence, Mako certainly doesn't have the guts to ask his boss or Tenzin about what exactly happened when their relationship fell apart. So instead he seeks out two mostly reliable sources—namely, Tenzin's irreverent siblings—and, in the process, gains an unexpected amount of insight into his chief.
Relationships: Bolin & Mako (Avatar), Lin Beifong & Mako, Lin Beifong/Tenzin
Comments: 3
Kudos: 110





	Wind Chimes

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm finally working my way through _Korra_ —I know, I know, only however many years late. And I binged the entire second season in one evening, and I decided that it needed 75% less Evil Vaatu Nonsense and 1500% more Lin Beifong Being A Total Badass. But I did truly live for Tenzin's sibs constantly giving him shit, and so how could I resist writing this, especially considering the additional hint we got into Tenzin and Lin's angst-ridden backstory. (And then I ended up finishing all of Seasons 3 and 4 before wrapping this up, hence the nods to Suyin-related drama and to Toph's, erm, questionable parenting methods.)
> 
> I own no rights to _Avatar: The Legend of Korra_ , obviously.

The first thing that Mako did after Korra saved the world, was take that "dippity-dip" that Bolin had encouraged him to take back in Republic City.

"See, bro?" yawned Bolin, reclining against the back of the tub in the very expensive Southern Water Tribe spa that they'd found. "Not that I wasn't already thoroughly enjoying all of the benefits that come with having a rock-solid body and some real acting chops. But it's even nicer to be enjoying them with you!"

From the edge of the tub, Pabu, who had eaten so many fish fritters that his stomach had swelled out like a drum, drowsily chirruped his agreement into the steamy air.

"Is this your way of asking me to heat up the water again?" mumbled Mako from the other side of the tub, where had had been lying motionless in the water for the past five minutes, trying not to fall asleep.

"Maaaaaaaybe?" said Bolin with a hopeful grin that Mako ignored. "But really, when we get home, let's move back in together again! You can soak in my tub anytime you want, that way! And now that you and Korra aren't together..." Bolin stopped and reconsidered. "Well, okay, at least now that you and _Asami_ aren't together..."

"Bolin," sighed Mako, his eyes still closed, "you know how we came to this spa to relax and not think about stressful things?"

"Hey, don't look at me," Bolin protested, "other than that thing where I literally fled the city on a boat to avoid getting married, _I_ haven't had much relationship drama lately. Didn't you see how nicely Eska and I broke things off? I'd like to see _you_ bow out of a relationship half so well, ha! If you decide to break up with Korra again, that is," he added.

Korra _had_ been acting slightly less warm ever since her battle with Unalaq, Mako had to admit. But it was hard to tell if that was her memory coming back, or simply a side effect of having had a light spirit pulled forcibly from her body, then returned to her body after an extended battle-to-the-death via astral projection with her evil, power-hungry, dark-spirit-possessed uncle. Mako was well aware that another break-up with Korra was inevitable; they both still were exactly who they'd been when they'd broken up a few weeks prior, after all. Still, he hated the thought of reliving the entire experience over again.

Especially since he had now seen a fifty-foot-tall cosmic-energy projection of his not-quite-girlfriend literally leave her body and fly through space to go vaporize a dark spirit in the middle of Yue Bay.

Mako wasn't worried about _actually_ getting vaporized, but he couldn't stop thinking about what his boss had said the first time he had broken up with Korra. Lin Beifong wasn't the Avatar, but she certainly was the most terrifying person Mako knew who wasn't the literal bridge to the Spirit World. (Or whatever Korra was now, since the portals were open and he had to get used to seeing neon-green spirits squiggling overhead as he walked through the streets.) Short of Korra going into the Avatar state in a fit of fury, Mako felt that hearing about what the Chief of Police had done in the aftermath of her break-up with Tenzin would probably be a reasonable proxy for whatever more violent reactions might await him in round two.

The thing was, even if Beifong herself had smugly offered that bit of information, Mako would rather face the entire angry Spirit World alone than ask his boss for any follow-up. The same went for Tenzin, whose typically high levels of anxiety were off the charts in the aftermath of everything that had happened to Jinora; Mako was slightly worried that one of the always-tense tendons in Tenzin's neck might actually snap if questioned about his ex at a moment like this.

That really only left Mako with one option.

"Hey there," Kya said when Mako appeared at her door. "Nice to see you without all sorts of trouble right around the corner, for once."

"Is that Mako?" called Bumi from inside Kya's home, and when he spotted the young Firebender behind his sister, he let out a loud "YAHOOOOOOO!"

"Sorry to bother you," Mako muttered.

"Not at all." Kya stepped back to let Mako in. "What's up?"

The interior of Kya's home looked at first glance like that of any other member of the Southern Water Tribe. But upon closer inspection, relics of her years of wandering quietly stood out against the cooling blue of the decorative scheme: a set of bronze bells from the Western Air Temple, an ink-brush scroll bordered in green silk from the Earth Kingdom, a thick Fire Nation rug woven in a deep shade of ruby underfoot. Bumi was sprawled on a low chair, nonchalantly munching on kale cookies, Bum-Ju perched on his shoulder; but he bounced out of the chair to clap Mako on the back, crumbs flying everywhere across the rug and Bum-Ju whirring lazily into the air.

"Come to hear more tales of Uncle Bumi's military exploits, has he?" roared the eccentric retired commander.

"Oh, shut up, Bumi, he's gotten enough of your stories to last several lifetimes by now," said Kya, rolling her eyes.

"Actually, I was hoping to hear one more story," Mako admitted.

"See, sis?" Bumi threw himself back into his chair, grinning wickedly. " _Well_ , have I told you yet about the time we were sent on a five-week rescue expedition at the bottom of the Fire Nation's largest active volcano...?"

"A specific story," Mako clarified quickly. (Bumi stopped mid-word, the corners of his gaping mouth softening with mild disappointment.) "Um, about Tenzin breaking up with Lin Beifong."

Whatever Kya and Bumi had been expecting, it wasn't that. For a moment, they both stared at Mako; the next moment, they both leaned forward slightly, sporting surprisingly similar wicked grins.

"Ooh, stories about Tenzin and Lin," breathed Kya with relish. "How many of those do you think we have between us, Bumi?"

"Saved up from a whole childhood of hanging out with the Beifongs?" Bumi smirked. "I'm guessing you don't want the story about the _first_ time Tenzin and Lin broke up? They must have been eight years old at the time..."

"Yeah, Tenzin had always had quite the thing for Lin, but when he finally accepted how much more daring she was than he was, he backed away pretty quickly," snickered Kya. "Not that Lin was ever _reckless_ , per se; she's always been a strategist. But once she's set on a strategy, she just _goes_ , and Tenzin..."

"Tenzin would rather just idle six feet off the ground than charge forward like that," snorted Bumi, who clearly was not in the practice of hesitating before charging straight into danger.

"He was so scared of her, when we were kids," Kya giggled. "I mean, he also was smitten, but in a sort of awestruck, terrified way. Didn't help that Toph was always teasing Dad, either, of course. Poor little Tenzin, our Dad's biggest fan, grew up with the firm conviction that the Beifongs were the most powerful people in the world, because they could make even the Avatar blush with embarrassment."

" _Now_ who's telling the wrong story?" Bumi scolded his sister. "You're in luck, kid. We both happened to be home on Air Temple Island when Tenzin broke up with Lin..."

_They had been arguing, of course. Those days, Tenzin and Lin spent more time shouting at each other than doing anything remotely romantic. Neither Kya nor Bumi could remember when Lin had begun wearing her metal armor even when off-duty, but they both suspected that it was around the time that she and Tenzin had begun fighting so bitterly._

"What about?" asked Mako.

"Oh, the usual." Kya rolled her eyes. "Tenzin grew up with the pressure of being one of two Airbenders left in the entire universe. Of _course_ he felt it was his duty to pass down his Airbending abilities to as many offspring as he could manage. And Lin..." Kya smirked. "Well, you've met Lin."

"Wasn't gonna stop until she was Chief of Police in Republic City, just like her ma," yawned Bumi. "That's really the root of both of their problems, Tenzin's and Lin's—neither ever managed to escape from the shadow of their famous parents."

"Yeah, Lin had big career ambitions and no interest whatsoever in slowing down professionally to raise a flock of little Tenzins," Kya agreed. "So when Tenzin met Pema..."

"Who couldn't think of _anything_ she'd rather do than become an Air Acolyte and rear a whole brood of Airbenders," Bumi added, rolling his eyes.

"Well, the arguing inevitably increased," shrugged Kya. "And that day, things just hit a boiling point..."

_Air Temple Island was designed to be as open as possible, to allow the wind to sweep across the flat training grounds and courtyards unimpeded. Unfortunately, this meant that everyone could hear Tenzin and Lin arguing, even as Kya and Bumi exchanged skeptical glances and half-heartedly tried to pretend that nothing was happening._

_"Would either of you like more tea?" Katara offered, in an attempt at normalcy. Kya, not wanting any excess noise to drown out the ongoing row, stopped the tea up in the teapot with a flick of her wrist when her mother tried to pour some into cups for her nosy children._

_"Lin, you just have to accept that our lives are on different paths!" shouted Tenzin's voice through the silence._

_"Yeah?" Lin shouted back. "Well, maybe that wouldn't be the case if you stopped trying to push me away like you have been!"_

_"I'm not pushing you away! You're just always working, and I never even see you anymore..."_

_"Things have been busy, okay? And you_ know _that I still care about you, Tenzin, even if I can't be here with you all the time. I was there for you when your dad died, wasn't I?"_

_A pause. Katara rolled her eyes as Kya and Bumi both craned their necks towards Tenzin's room, eager to hear more._

_"Leave Republic City with me," Tenzin finally said in a low voice. "Come with me to the Northern Air Temple. We could start over there, we could be happy again..."_

_"Tenzin, please," scoffed Lin. "You know why I can't do that."_

_"Why not?" Tenzin bristled. "Other people would, you know."_

_"Well, maybe 'other people' don't have as much to give up!" snapped Lin. "Spirits, Tenzin, have you never considered that you might not be the_ only _person with a destiny to fulfill?!"_

_"What destiny could possibly be more important than helping me rebuild the Air Nation?!"_

_"I'm a Metalbender, Tenzin," Lin exploded. "Put me in an Air Acolyte robe if you want, but that is who I am and who I will always be. I want to be with you, but my place is here, in the Republic City Police Force, carrying on the work that my mom started. And I cannot and will not change who I am, not even for you. Do you love me enough to accept that?"_

_Kya and Bumi craned their necks even further into the silence that followed._

_"How about we play a nice round of Pai Sho?" Katara suggested, only to be shushed by her two older children._

_"What did you just say?" Lin now spoke with something like a note of panic._

_"I said, goodbye, Lin," Tenzin replied in a louder voice, and both of his siblings were startled by the bitter resolve in their usually tentative brother's tone. "You're right. Wind chimes look and sound beautiful, but no matter how fiercely the wind blows, the metal never becomes one with the air."_

"Did he really say that?" Bumi interrupted, snorting.

"From what I remember, yeah he did," Kya insisted.

"Ugh, that is _such_ typical Tenzin," groaned his older brother, tossing another kale cookie into his mouth. "Always trying to sound like the reincarnation of Guru Laghima, with one strained poetic metaphor or another..."

"And what did Beifong do then?" Mako interrupted.

"Well, she stormed out the door, first," Bumi said. "Think Tenzin was probably breathing a premature sigh of relief."

"Because then she stopped in the middle of the courtyard and turned back towards the temple," Kya continued. "And that's when..."

_Kya and Bumi had both experienced earthquakes before, little tremors that knocked vases off shelves and skewed the paintings and photographs hanging on the walls. But Lin's fury at being rejected was like nothing either had ever felt before. Bumi seized his mother before Katara toppled over and dove under the table with her; Kya shrieked in alarm and crouched low on the floor. Neither could say exactly how long the shaking lasted, but by the time the earth stopped rolling beneath them, Lin had disappeared, and the entire island was in shambles. Huge rocks jutted out of the ground from the center of the courtyard where Tenzin usually meditated, the tree where Tenzin and Lin used to sit when they were younger and still laughed together was almost falling into the ocean because the ground around it had eroded so much..._

"Oh, and Tenzin's bedroom!" crowed Bumi. "Don't forget about what happened to Tenzin's bedroom!"

"What happened?" Mako asked, alarmed.

"Lin sent a sheet of rock straight up through the floor that completely blocked the door and most of the windows," snickered Kya. "Tenzin had to squirm out through the little bit of window that wasn't blocked. It was _extremely_ undignified."

"Great," sighed Mako, resigned to the very real possibility that his maybe-girlfriend, the Avatar, might trap him inside a room with earthbending until Bolin had the presence of mind to come rescue him. "How long did it take to repair things?"

"Oh, not that long," shrugged Kya. "Lin, being Lin, went back to her office and wrote up a police report detailing her property destruction on Air Temple Island. Then she went back the next morning, apologized profusely to Mom, and set everything right. Even rescued that tree from falling into the water."

"By that point, Tenzin had already flown off with Oogi to brood," Bumi added. "I don't think that Lin would have turned up if she hadn't anticipated that that was exactly what he would do."

"Anyway," concluded Kya, "Lin cleaned everything up, and Mom of course didn't press charges—I think she made Lin sit down and drink some tea, instead."

"The Uncle Iroh calming method is tried and true," Bumi opined, more to a purring Bum-Ju than to Mako. "Except when it doesn't work and the tea drinker then tries and fails to get her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend thrown in jail."

Mako winced. Kya, noticing, pushed the plate of kale cookies away from Bumi and towards the Firebender.

"Don't think too harshly of Lin for all of this," she advised. "It's not our place to tell you about her family, but suffice to say she had a kind of isolated childhood. She wanted so much to be able to rely on the people closest to her, and one by one, they let her down. Tenzin was one of the few people she ever really trusted to stick by her through thick and thin. And after he let her down, too... well, it definitely wasn't _right_ , what she did to Air Temple Island and then to Pema, but I kinda get it."

Mako kind of did, too, and since his second break-up with Korra somehow ended up being one of the most anti-climactic things that had happened to him in the past year, he was left with far more time to think about Beifong and her complicated past than he would have expected. Team Avatar returned to Republic City, and Mako discovered that, in a fashion, his bedroom _had_ been completely (if indirectly) destroyed by his girlfriend. When Tenzin heard that Mako needed somewhere to sleep that wasn't overrun by spirit vines, he invited Mako to Air Temple Island, but the young police officer declined. As relatively normal as things between himself and Korra were, Mako was still sorting out his thoughts and feelings, and Air Temple Island seemed like a particularly ironic place to do so, knowing what he now knew.

He should have anticipated that Beifong herself would discover in short order that he had started sleeping at the police station.

"You should go home," his boss told him just before midnight one evening, and Mako nodded but was still at his desk when the chief passed through an hour later. She frowned when she noticed him and dropped a heavy stack of files into a filing cabinet that she closed with a careless flick of one wrist. "Kid, I'm serious, what're you still doing here?"

"Sticking around in case you need help," Mako lied.

"After I expressly ordered you to go home an hour ago?" Beifong narrowed her eyes at her officer, then stepped behind his desk and sighed at the bedroll stowed beneath it. "How many nights?"

Mako opened his mouth to respond, and instead of answering, he said, "Please don't make me leave."

Beifong's eyebrows rose an inch, and she lowered herself into the chair at the next desk over.

"Stay here as long as you want, I certainly don't care," she shrugged. "I just thought you were staying on Air Temple Island with your brother."

"Yeah, things are a little... complicated," Mako explained. "Not with Bolin, I mean, just, generally."

"Hmm," replied Beifong, not unsympathetically. She eyed Mako critically. "Are you doing okay?"

It wasn't a question that Mako was anticipating from his curmudgeonly boss. He blinked.

"Listen," sighed Beifong, "I don't need anyone on my team to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, especially with half the city in a fit of anxiety already over the spirits."

"I'm fine," said Mako. "Just need some time to sort things out. Not that it's surprising that fire and water don't mix particularly well, but still. I hope you understand."

"Yeah," said Beifong softly.

After a moment, she stood up and headed back towards her office. Mako assumed that the police chief would be at her desk for the next hour, but within a minute, she had returned, pulling a faded green pillowcase onto a lumpy pillow.

"Here," she said, tossing the pillow to Mako. When she saw the surprise on his face, one corner of her mouth quirked up. "You're not the only officer who's ever preferred camping out here to going back to their apartment, kid. Now, I mean it, go to sleep, I don't need you yawning all through the day tomorrow. I promise not to make too much noise as I finish things up over here."

Mako nodded his thanks, hugging the pillow to his chest. And he suddenly thought of how different things would be right now, if Lin Beifong had decided to suppress her own ambitions and marry Tenzin, if she had left Republic City for a life of robes and meditation and putting pillowcases on pillows for Tenzin's children, instead of reviewing arrest warrants at one in the morning while clad in her metal armor. The young Firebender considered that his boss _might_ have been happy. But all he could think of were wind chimes, air sending metal crashing relentlessly against dented metal for the musical benefit of all who could hear.

"Hey, Chief?" Beifong turned in the door of her office. "Uh, thanks. For the pillow. And for everything else."

By which Mako meant the job, and the secure income, and the chance to use his firebending for the good of the public in a manner that was less haphazard than electricity generation. And, of course, the sense of finally belonging to something that was larger than he was; something that wasn't quite a family, but that had a heart and a soul and a personality, and that Mako could truly make his _own_ , in a way that being a part of Team Avatar (which logically revolved around Korra) never quite could. He never would have had any of this, if Lin Beifong had made a different choice years ago. But it was too late—or perhaps it was too early—and Mako didn't have the wherewithal to put into words his gratitude to his chief for stubbornly refusing to be anything other than herself.

Somehow, though, Mako felt that his boss might have understood what he was trying to say, and he fell asleep with this comforting thought in mind. If he had been awake when Lin finally left the police station, Mako might have been reassured by how the Metalbender paused and shot a small smile at the sleeping officer, before turning off all the lights and locking up.


End file.
